Dave Malloy's GHOST QUARTET Plays in Concert at Maria Hernandez Park Tonight

The Bushwick Starr presents the very first performance of The Mayor's Office of Media & Entertainment's Off Broadway in the Boros inaugural series. For one night only, tonight, July 29th, 2016, Dave Malloy, composer/playwright of the Broadway-bound Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, brings his award-winning chamber musical GHOST QUARTET, a haunted song cycle about love, death, and whisky, to Bushwick's Maria Hernandez Park for a very special outdoor performance at sunset.

Ballads, doo-wop, jazz noise, and raucous campfire songs collide in this immersive show, blurring the line between theater and contemporary music performance. The story follows four friends through four interwoven narratives spanning seven centuries: a warped fairy tale about two sisters, a treehouse astronomer and a lazy evil bear; a retelling of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"; a purgatorial intermezzo about Scheherazade; and a contemporary fable about a subway murder. Witnessing this remarkable show under the stars in Bushwick is sure to be at once intimate, vast, haunting, and magical, and will unite its own community under its spell.

Winner of a 2015 Elliott Norton Award, GHOST QUARTET premiered at The Bushwick Starr in NYC in October 2014, and has since played a 5-month run at the McKittrick Hotel (home of Sleep No More) in NYC, Boston's Club Oberon, San Francisco's Curran Theater, and in a number of living rooms, bars, and around campfires. The shows stars Malloy, Great Comet stars Brittain Ashford and Gelsey Bell, and cellist Brent Arnold, with design by Christopher Bowser and direction by Annie Tippe.

As part of the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment's 50th anniversary celebrations, highlighting New York City's vibrant history in film, theatre and broadcasting, the agency is staging Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Off-Off-Broadway theatrical performances throughout the five boroughs this summer. These fun and entertaining shows are family-friendly, free and open to the public, and will take place in communities that have little access to public programming.

The performance will take place ta Maria Hernandez Park spans Knickerbocker and Irving between Starr and Suydam Streets in Bushwick Brooklyn, NY. Rain date: July 30th. Via Subway take the L Train to Jefferson Street, exit at Starr Street, walk against traffic on Starr, and the Park is a block away at the corner of Starr and Irving.

THE ENSEMBLE:

GHOST QUARTET is

Brent Arnold (vocals, cello, guitar, erhu, dulcimer, percussion)
Brittain Ashford (vocals, autoharp, keyboard, percussion)
Gelsey Bell (vocals, metallophone, Celtic harp, accordion, percussion)
Dave Malloy (vocals, piano, keyboard, ukulele, percussion)

Music, Lyrics, and Text by Dave Malloy
except "The Wind & Rain" (trad.) and portions of "Usher, Parts 1-3" (text by Edgar Allan Poe )
Developed and Arranged by GHOST QUARTET
Directed by Annie Tippe
Production & Lighting Design by Christopher Bowser
Sound Design by Dave Malloy
Dramaturgy by James Monaco

Dave Malloy (composer/writer, vocals, piano, keyboards, ukulele, percussion) is a composer/writer/performer/Sound Designer. He has written the music for eleven musicals, including Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, an electropop opera based on War & Peace, which opens on Broadway this fall, starring Josh Groban as Pierre. Comet premiered at Ars Nova in the fall of 2012, before transferring Off-Broadway to Kazino, a Russian supper club built specially for the show; the show ran for over 300 performances and won the Richard Rodgers Award, an Obie, and 11 Lortel nominations. He is also one of the co-creators of Three Pianos, a drunken romp through Schubert's "Winterreise" that won an Obie in 2010. Other musicals include Preludes, Black Wizard/Blue Wizard, Beowulf - A Thousand Years of Baggage, Beardo, Sandwich, and Clown Bible. He has won a Jonathan Larson Grant, an ASCAP New Horizons Award, and a NEA/TCG Grant for Theatre Designers, has been a Guest Professor in devised music theater at Princeton and Vassar Universities, and is the composer for Banana Bag & Bodice. Future projects include adaptations of Moby-Dick and Shakespeare's Henriad, commissioned by The Public and Berkeley Repertory Theater. He lives in Brooklyn. davemalloy.com

Complete album available at davemalloy.bandcamp.com/album/ghost-quartet. For more, visit davemalloy.com/ghost.html, and for Edinburgh Fringe tickets, go to tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/ghost-quartet.

The Bushwick Starr is an Obie Award winning non profit theater that presents an annual Season of new work in theater, dance, and puppetry. We are an organization defined by both our artists and our community, and since 2007, we have grown into a thriving theatrical venue, a vital neighborhood arts center, and a destination for exciting and engaging performance. The Bushwick Starr's mission is to help ambitious artists and ambitious audiences find each other. We provide a springboard for emerging professional artists to make career-defining leaps, and we are a sanctuary where established performance companies come to experiment and innovate. Our past Seasons have included new work from groundbreaking artists such as Clare Barron, Dave Malloy, The Debate Society, the TEAM, and Half Straddle.

The Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) is comprised of two divisions. The Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting encompasses film, television, radio, theatre, music, advertising, publishing, digital content and real estate as it relates to the creation of creative content. It serves as a one-stop shop for the entertainment industry, which has seen explosive growth over the last year in New York City, contributing nearly $9 billion and over 130,000 jobs. The Office promotes New York City as a thriving center of creativity, issuing permits for productions filming on public property, and facilitating production throughout the five boroughs. The Agency also oversees NYC Media, the City's official broadcast network and media production group, which has a reach of over 18 million people and provides programming for six local cable stations, including award-winning programs on the popular NYC Life (channel 25), as well as one radio station. You can also follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.